I haven’t blogged so far this week, because I was down in London on a training course. The course, run by the Local Government Association (LGA) took me to a range of London Councils, from inner boroughs such as Southwark, through trendy Islington and Camden, and out to meet the leaders of suburban Kingston and Sutton. The political hacks amongst you will notice that these are all Lib Dem led Councils. The reason is that the LGA sensibly streams this training course, so that members of each party join seperate groups meeting Council’s run by their own – who are therefore much more likely to open up with honest comments about the issues they face.

And there is one issue that dominates above all else at the moment. Cuts. Every Council up and down the land is facing daunting levels of cuts over the coming 3 or 4 years. The reason is that central government has to reduce its deficit significantly over this time. But all parties have pledged to protect spending on the NHS and other key services such as education. All fine and good but if you do that, the cuts on other services – many run by local Councils, become proportionately bigger. Around 20% across Council services according to many forecasters. In London that means around 25 – 30,000 redundancies.

In Birmingham the Evening Mail has estimated that around 7,000 will lose their jobs over the coming decade. Estimates for that far into the future are no more than guesses, but it seems consistent with the London picture I saw earlier in the week. Cuts of this scale overwhelm any efficiency measures a Council can realistically deliver. Whats more the pressures that have built up this year caused by the implementation of Single Status (which is a good thing in principle, but hugely costly in practice) and the increasing demand on social care (from both young and old people) have meant many of the less painful measures have already been taken.

Its not going to be much fun running any Council over the next few years, but if anything, good management becomes even more important in difficult years such as these. It may not be a problem of our making, but Councillors and Officers will have to work as hard as we can to minimise the impact of these cash cuts, on the services we provide to the people of Birmingham. The very first step should be no pay rise for any of us this year. In fact I’d like to go further with anyone in the Council earning over £50k taking a pay cut. This won’t happen, but I think it would be the right thing to do, I strongly believe the top Council staff earn too much and when its at the expense of their colleagues’ jobs and the services they provide the public, they should take a cut in those pay levels.